Midlife pressures, married life and how to survive them

The anomie is at the gates in "Happy Now?" playwright Lucinda Coxon's astringent study of early midlife crisis among the solidly middle class in London. The punctuation in the title serves as ironic eyewink. Nobody in Coxon's world has any lasting claim on contentment. But though both Coxon's script and Roger Smart's staging for Shattered Globe tend to feel trapped in an airless bell jar of self-conscious angst, there are several moments that ought to resonate for audience members — particularly on the distaff side — who might find Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?" (another question mark!) an appropriate soundtrack for their lives.

Kitty (Christina Gorman) is a harried midlevel executive at a cancer charity with two young children and a husband, Johnny (Steve Peebles) who has attempted to follow his bliss — or at least his ethics — by leaving a well-paid legal career to become a teacher. Their friends, caddish and hard-drinking Miles (Drew Schad) and tightly wound Bea (Cortney McKenna), attempt to fix their dissolving marital relationship through home renovations. As Bea puts it, they need a "joint project" to bring them together — as if the human lives contained within the newly painted walls (Coxon wrings laughs out of the many shades of beige under consideration by control-freak Bea) aren't enough of a challenge. And because this is an urban comedy of manners, of course Kitty has a gay confidant, Carl (Karack Osborn), who seems to be in the show mostly to justify running jokes about "Will and Grace" and to allow Miles to hit the "homophobic jerk" zone on the Offensive Meter.

Most intriguingly, Coxon offers Kitty a sort of debauched spirit guide in the form of Michael (Ben Werling), an older fellow charity manager and "creepy sad-sack guy." In the play's first scene, Michael hits on Kitty at a conference, limns the unsatisfying outlines of her life and treats her rebuff to his advances with aplomb. Sooner or later, he tells her, life's frustrations will drive her into his bed. Werling's deliciously unctuous take on Michael makes one wish he had more stage time.

Instead, Coxon spend a lot of time treading territory familiar to anyone who has seen Donald Margulies' "Dinner With Friends" or any of the other myriad portraits of discontented-but-reasonably-well-off married folks. The primary problem with Coxon's script is that it tends to limit Kitty to playing a reactive role. Whether it's the never-seen kids, her critically ill father or her nutty mother, June, (Linda Reiter), who refuses to answer the phone because she's convinced herself for years that it's her ex-husband on the other end begging for another chance, Kitty spends a lot of time absorbing and deflecting the demands of everyone else around her.

Certainly, there are lots of women like Kitty caught in squeeze plays between parents, kids, spouses and jobs. But at least in Gorman's reading, little beyond a generalized exasperation comes through, and Kitty becomes less and less interesting as the show progresses. Uneven accents among some in the ensemble occasionally distract from the sharpness of Coxon's dialogue. But as a wry commentary on overcommitted and under-satisfied 30-somethings, "Happy Now?" has — like the lives of its protagonists — moments of undeniable, if fleeting, charm.